‘Promoting subject experts shouldn’t be our priority’

Offering financial rewards to teachers who can provide leadership is more important than promoting those with specialist subject expertise, a key figure in Scottish education has said.

John Stodter, general secretary of the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland (ADES), added that rigidly sticking to traditional subject boundaries won’t help pupils to make sense of critical global issues such as terrorism and climate change.

Mr Stodter made the claims in response to a call from the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association (SSTA) for the reinstatement of principal teachers for all ...

Protest that led to a strike

The first teacher-only strike in Scotland since the 1980s took place in West Dunbartonshire earlier this year.

A major factor in the strike was a local plan to cut principal teacher posts and move towards faculty structures that would pull together, for example, PE with home economics and English with modern languages.

Larry Flanagan, general secretary of the EIS teaching union, predicted that this would create a “generic mess” and leave certain subject teachers isolated if their faculty head had a different specialism.

The issue was resolved earlier this year, and subject teachers will now continue to play a central role in West Dunbartonshire.

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